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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26534149">Vireo</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/KingOuija/pseuds/KingOuija'>KingOuija</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Magnus Archives (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Do Not Archive (The Magnus Archives), Episode 177, Gen, Jon and Basira being rough on each other, Suicide mention, Telepathy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 06:06:50</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,860</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26534149</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/KingOuija/pseuds/KingOuija</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Jon shares his perspective on the apocalypse.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Basira Hussain &amp; Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, background jon/martin - Relationship</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>50</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Vireo</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Basira wonders whether Martin can see the difference between himself and Jon, between her and Jon.</p><p>Martin is dirty, visibly drawn and tired. His anorak, like her blazer, is spotted with dark stains, dried into the fabric and sweated clear in the middle, layered two and three deep in places. When he impulsively grabbed her up in a hug back in the woods, the smell of smoke overwhelmed even the smell of their unwashed bodies.</p><p>Jon is clean. His collar is still sharply creased, jumper pristine. He's tucked his trousers into the tops of his stiff, new-looking hiking boots. The filth doesn't stick to those boots. She kept noticing, when they were in the forest, the little gleam of unlight from above shining on them. She pushed ahead, past Jon and Martin, so she wouldn't have to look at the two of them.</p><p>She stops charging ahead of them after her encounter with Noah Thomson. She lets Jon lead the group out of Wonderland's gleaming white halls into somewhere else, indulging in the occasional fiery glare she silently dares Jon to see. <em>-she saved you, you disloyal-she saved you both, and if she hadn't, she'd have been fine. I wouldn't be here hunting her-none of us would be here. You have the nerve to call her a monster when you're the entire reason-</em></p><p>The transition between places happens gradually. She notices first that she's no longer having to squint against the horricolored light, and then that she hasn't seen a patronizing wall poster in some time. Then, that it's become very quiet. Jon's and Martin's voices as they idly chat back and forth are quieter, too. They fall gradually from whispers to silence. Martin's sneaker skids against the lino with a rubbery squeak and he flinches, turns to Jon and then to her with a wince of apology. The air's more humid here than in Wonderland, the hot wire odor having fading to something like damp laundry left to go sour. (Everything fucking reeks now. <em>Everything.</em> If it's not sun-swollen, buzzing guts it's burning asphalt or it's tears. And the moment you notice yourself getting used to it, you have to move on because it means the place is getting its hooks into you.)</p><p>They step softly as the squares of light in the ceiling grow dimmer and farther apart.</p><p>"It's night on the ward," Jon says softly, like he can't stop himself. By this point, Basira is so on edge she nearly swears at him.</p><p>The words die in her throat when something dark and low to the ground crosses the hall no more that ten meters in front of them. It's still crossing when the front of it disappears through a door standing open. It's long, like some sort of enormous snake, but with soft edges--not feathery, not furry. Soft like the crawling edges of the dark shape in your room as a child. It's silent, like a snake, but snakes don't have legs. Nothing has legs like <em>that.</em></p><p>The thing's body finally ends, the last of it disappearing through the door, and Basira realizes that she's pushed the two men up against the wall, gotten ahead of them somehow, and her gun is in her hand.</p><p>The thing takes no notice of their presence. It does something inside the room, then leaves, slithering away down the hall away from them, disappearing around a corner. Basira only realizes once the thing is gone that there had been a quiet, rhythmic hiss and gurgle coming from inside the room. The sound is gone now.</p><p>She turns to Jon and Martin in time to catch them exchanging a look, eyebrows raised. The intimate humor in it makes her want to slap them. Instead she lets them away from the wall, reholstering her gun.</p><p>So this won't be necessary going forward, then. Jumping at every shadow, weapon always at the ready. Joining Jon's retinue means traveling in safety.</p><p>"How's this place for a rest?" Martin asks Jon. "It looks cleanish. I assume there are beds."</p><p>"This is a good place for it. Basira?" She shakes her head. "If we go much further, I'll need to...to take another break."</p><p>"And Daisy?"</p><p>"It's not about how fast we travel, but the way we take."</p><p>She shrugs. <em>Do as you please.</em> She turned Helen down, after all. It's not like she has a choice.</p><p>She notices Martin hangs back and lets Jon choose the room and enter first. She sees immediately why he chose it. The hospital room has two empty beds, the ones closest to the door. One for Martin, she assumes. One for her.</p><p>There's a third bed against the far wall. An old person, with white hair cut short and uneven, is lying in it, so stiff they're quivering under the thin white sheet. Breath hisses through the tubes in their nose. Their eyes are locked unseeingly on the door, fingers hopelessly punching a little red button on a plastic box on the rail of their bed, again and again and again.</p><p>Jon pulls the privacy blind closed around the old person, and then turns to Martin and Basira.</p><p>"It should be a while before the thing in the hall comes back this way. I'll keep watch."</p><p>"He doesn't sleep anymore," Martin explains to Basira, an odd note of apology in his voice. Maybe something in her expression demands it. "The keeping watch is sort of unavoidable? But you can ask him not to look at you, of course, and he won't."</p><p>Jon and Martin get to work taking the rails off the bed closest to the door. It's not a quiet process. Basira turns and faces the closed blind behind which the terrified old person trembles, because if she has to watch the two of them fumble with it, she'll scream.</p><p>By the time she turns back, they're nestled in the bed, fully clothed, shoes included. Jon is curled protectively around Martin, who's pillowed his head on his hands and is doing a decent impression of an apple-cheeked sleeping angel. Keeper of homely little habits he is, she wonders if he will actually sleep. If he can, or if he just pretends.</p><p>She sits in the middle of her bed facing them. Jon opens his mouth to protest, then thinks better of it. He focuses on Martin instead. His hand drops to Martin's hair, fingers patiently separating the spikes stiff with Trevor's dried blood. At some point, Martin relaxes under Jon's hand and his breathing slows. Sleep is possible, it seems. The soft clicking behind the privacy blind continues.</p><p>"Something on your mind?" Jon asks softly after a while. Basira was just noticing that whenever his hand closes in Martin's curls, it looks like a claw for just a moment.</p><p>"You said earlier I couldn't kill you."</p><p>Jon sighs. He puts his finger over his mouth, <em>wait,</em> then disentangles himself from Martin, pulling the sheet and thin blanket over him as he gets up. He looks for a place to sit, before pulling a visitor's chair up to the foot of her bed.</p><p>"Sorry, don't want to wake him." Jon says. "You couldn't kill me, yes."</p><p>"Martin said you're no good with hypotheticals."</p><p>He makes an acknowledging noise.</p><p>"So...was that a-" <em>lie</em> "-an educated guess?"</p><p>"No. It's been tested. I...um. I tested it."</p><p>Ah. She doesn't know what to say to that. Jon willed himself back to life from literal bloody fragments. It's hard to square that determination to survive with…</p><p>"Don't tell Martin," he adds sheepishly. "It wasn't-it was purely practical. I had to try."</p><p>"Was it-"</p><p>"Right after it happened." He pauses. "Did Martin tell you how it happened? How Jonah did it?"</p><p>She shakes her head.</p><p>"His care package made it to the cabin before yours did."</p><p>Her care package? It takes her a moment to remember what he could be referring to. It feels so long ago, and there was so much to manage right after the attack on the Institute. "There was a statement inside that wasn't a real statement. It was an invocation. All it took to end the world was my reading it. A few lines of rhyming verse."</p><p>"Hm. And I suppose you couldn't <em>not</em> read it."</p><p>Her jibes don't seem to connect most of the time, but this one really does. She didn't even really mean it to hurt--it's reflexive at this point--but his breath rushes out through his nostrils like she's buried her fist in his gut. His eyes close so tight the lids wrinkle.</p><p>A weak part of her wants to take it back, but she doesn't. She just waits out the silence instead.</p><p>"There are some things I can't do," he says deliberately, hands clenched on his knees.</p><p>Jon likes to say that. It hasn't escaped her that the things he "can't do" tend to be things that would benefit anyone in the world besides him.</p><p>"You couldn't even stop reading."</p><p>"…no." He's still hurting. Good. Why should he be the only one who doesn't? He breathes out fiercely, pinching the bridge of his nose, pushing his glasses nearly into his hair for a moment. When he finally speaks again, his voice has a lightness in it she recognizes as dangerous. "Do you want to know what it felt like to end the world, Basira?"</p><p>"What?"</p><p>"I can help you understand, if you want. You stayed with me when I-" she can see him make the decision to discard euphemism, "made my statement in Wonderland. You want to understand."</p><p>Jon's eyes are deep and dark and earnest. Maybe he really does just want her to understand. Or maybe it's a trap. It doesn't really matter which it is, though, because she is who she is and she can't not take what he's offering.</p><p>"How will you do it? You'll turn the Eye on me like Martin said?"</p><p>"No." He gives a humorless twitch of laughter. "Closer to the opposite."</p><p>"Is it going to hurt?"</p><p>"No. It won't <em>hurt.</em>" Hmm. "You won't like it," he warns.</p><p>"How long will it last?"</p><p>"It took less than a minute."</p><p>"But it might not feel like a minute," she guesses.</p><p>He nods.</p><p>This is a bad idea.</p><p>"How did you put it?" she muses. "'You can't hunt a monster you refuse to understand?'" This time, he doesn't flinch. "Go on then. Do your creepy Eye thing."</p><p>She starts to feel it before the sentence is even done. It's like she's looked down suddenly and seen her toes hanging over the edge of a cliff and it's miles down, clouds thin and distant below her, and she's already tipping forward before she can wheel her arms to regain her balance. She grabs Jon's wrist <em>hard, </em>but before she can tell him to stop, she falls.</p><p>Into what? Into <em>what?</em> A circle of black that glitters just like Jon's eyes do when he's emotional or hungry. She falls toward those sparks of light and they get huge around her and then she's plummeting through them, and it's darkness from horizon to horizon. As flat black as Jon's eyes when he goes dead inside. Like the Eye.</p><p>But the Eye's in the sky, so it's actually not falling at all, is it? She's rising. Flying toward it, but that's not right either. She's growing toward it. She can't scream and she can't stop. Something she won't come back from will happen when she hits. A smudge appears within the blackness, grows as she rockets toward it, three darker pits inside--two eyes and her mouth so large in a silent scream that it takes up half her face. Then she connects, eye to reflection of eye, mouth to reflection of mouth.</p><p>It swallows her wholly.</p><p>
  <em>  </em>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <em>  </em>
</p><p>Basira Hussain had lived inside herself, mostly in comfort, for over thirty years.</p><p>She knew the serenity of meditation. Had gotten good at it as a child. Holding a thought until her mind went clear, holding a position until her feet tingled, went numb, went warm, and then she'd enjoy a few moments' illusion of rising before something gave way. Usually her back first, then her self-discipline.</p><p>She knew what it felt like to win. The triumphant twirl of a lacrosse stick in her hand after scoring, the stick transforming into the Silence Glaive. Dancing away from the goal on tiptoes--imagined high heels--grinning.</p><p>She knew the satisfaction in many small goals accomplished, day after day, tied off and filed away in dusty triplicate in her small, even hand. Pages turned, lines consumed, covers closed.</p><p>She's been relied on, loved, called some time between seven and eight pm every Tuesday and Sunday every week of her adult life and asked if she's getting enough to eat. There were people who could never have too many pictures of her.</p><p>She knows how to feel good. Lots of different kinds of good and lots of different ways.</p><p>She doesn't know how to feel this.</p><p>It's not like laughing. It's like being laughter. Nothing can hide from her, nothing can hold up the mask of dignity in front of its face. It's all tiny and ridiculous spread out beneath her. Squirming, wet, glands squirting adrenaline, bleeding screams. The red, wet greebling of suffering humanity. <em>It's funny.</em> It's so funny that they're all screaming and none of them can hear each other, and that the only one who can hear doesn't care. It's funny how stereotypical they are in their pain. They don't know how unoriginal they are. Each one of them, if they could think right now, would think there's something special about their fear. How it's felt, how it's expressed. They can't hear the mouth screaming next to their own ear. They can't hear the harmony of their collective noise--so many screams combining into a beautiful purring hum. The flailings of every fearing, fleeing one of them following the same patterns like they've been designed to. They just keep going and going, dying and living, and screaming tirelessly for help that will never, ever come. It all moves together like the most exquisitely precise machine ever engineered--each of its billions of parts precisely placed to highlight its individual futility, but no one or dozen or hundred in the least important. No human joke was ever this profound and this perfectly constructed or this cruel.</p><p>It comes to her she could count the billions to the number. Her eye is an odometer. It's a scale. Or she could zero in on just one of them, close in enough to pick out the tiny irregular uniquenesses that makes it different from all the others, because her eye is also a telescope and a microscope. She could find, say, her neighbor who played COD all weekend until three in the morning, his gunshots thumping through her bedroom wall while she tried to sleep. Maybe bullets are tearing him into chunks right now. That would be fitting. Or the woman who used to do her hair who moved away suddenly and she never found out where--Basira could know where she was now, if she wanted. She couldn't begin to guess what that woman had been most afraid of. She could find Daisy, if she cared to. She could recognize something she loved in all of the smooth, regular operations of the machine. Her eye is every speculative tool of observation and measurement and classification there's no real analogue for.</p><p>But her eye is also a mouth, and why even bother looking when it feels so good to just open up into a big, black circle and swallow it all down. It all tastes the same, and it's all delicious.</p><p>
  <em>Yes, mum, I'm finally getting enough to eat. I've grown up big and strong. You'd hardly know me.<br/>
</em>
</p><p>She gradually becomes aware of an annoyance, distant at first. Her body, she realizes, <em>ugh,</em> eyes drying out, mouth tasting of sour laundry. A wave of dismay at the realization smothers her enjoyment. She's the great peal of laughter that flays flesh to mist and makes bone spiral in on itself, it's <em>not right </em>to be both. To be a little human body just like the little human gears spinning away manufacturing the fear. To be sitting in a dingy little place that's pretending to be a hospital room on a mattress that can't even be bothered to pretend to have springs. She can still feel that if she moved her hand the right way, it would tear the air open like a soggy hive and the honey of wounded illusion would seep out, but at the same time, she can't even move. Her silly little person-body is still frozen where it was a little less than a minute before, hand still clinging to Jon's wrist. She should, at the very least, be able to tell the hand to tighten, break his wrist, break his hold on her, but it won't.</p><p>Basira only realizes she's been speaking once she finishes and goes silent. She can again hear the soft clicking that never stopped.</p><p>"Could <em>you</em> stop reading?" Jon says.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This was conceived of and mostly written between 177 and 178. It took me a while to realize it didn't need to be very long, though.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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